Likened to television’s relatively recent inundation by home remodeling and design programs over the last ten years is an increasingly popular direction by filmmakers towards renovating our highly recognizable, but slowly aging monster franchises—classic models like Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)—with a new re-envisaged generation of monster progeny, like Friday the 13th (2009), and Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009); and now in the works for 2010 are New Line Cinema’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, starring Jackie Earle Haley as the new “Freddy,” as well as a screen version of Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s novel, Dracula The Un-Dead (Dutton, October 2009), the official sequel to Dracula (1897) authorized by the Stoker family estate.

The theoretical scope of this topical area invites papers treating these and other shifting representations of the monstrous; recent evolutionary patterns in mainstream, as well as minor, horror and science fiction narratives; and/or the tensioning of conservative and progressive elements in the representationality of monstrosity and “deviance,” a relationship that has figured prominently in the attempt(s) of many to work through collective anxieties, traumas, or aspirations, which, for our purposes, can be mapped out using visible artifacts such as film or television.

Papers examining these issues are only a small sampling of the array of topics that may be explored by presenters. Please send abstract proposals to John Edgar Browning at jbrow11@lsu.edu for consideration.